El Kookooee

On the last Sunday of
October, friends gather in the South Valley of Albuquerque, New Mexico for an amazing autumn ritual – the
burning of El Kookooee. The giant
effigy, designed by local school children, towers thirty feet above the crowd. Dance troupes twirl and shimmy. Scraps of paper containing scribbled
fears and worries are tossed inside the giant, and burned up in flames.